If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, the Japanese show themselves in no respect inferior, and in some important respects superior, to the Americans. New though they are to the whole mental attitude which underlies science and its applications, they have already, in half a century, produced physicians, surgeons, pathologists, engineers who can hold their own with the best of Europe and America. All that the West can do in this, its own special sphere, the Japanese, late-comers though they be, are showing that they can do too. In particular, to apply the only test which the Western nations seem really to accept, they can build ships, train men, organise a campaign, and beat a great Western Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But all this, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in our imagination, is secondary and subordinate in a true estimate of civilisation. The great claim the Japanese may make, as I began by saying, is that they have known how to live; and they have proved that by the only test—by the way they have reflected life.
Japanese literature and art may not be as great as that of Europe; but it exists, whereas that of America and all the new countries is yet to seek. While Europe was still plunged in the darkest of the dark ages, Japanese poets were already producing songs in exquisite response to the beauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human life. From the seventh century on, their painting and their sculpture was reflecting in tender and gracious forms the mysteries of their faith. Their literature and their art changed its content and its form with the centuries, but it continued without a break, in a stream of genuine inspiration, down to the time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. From that moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. But what a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof that the Japanese belong to the civilised nations—the nations that can live and express life.
But perhaps this test may be rejected. Morals, it may be urged, is the touchstone of civilisation, not art. Well, take morals. The question is a large one; but, summarily, where do the Japanese fail, as compared with the Western nations? Is patriotism the standard? In this respect what nation can compete with them? Is it courage? What people are braver? Is it industry? Who is more industrious? It is their very industry that has aroused the jealous fears of the Californians. Is it family life? Where, outside the East, is found such solidarity as in Japan? Is it sexual purity? On that point, what Western nation can hold up its head? Is it honesty? What of the honesty of the West? No; no Westerner, knowing the facts, could for a moment maintain that, all round and on the whole, the morals of the Japanese are inferior to those of Europe or America. It would probably be easier to maintain the opposite. Judged by every real test the Japanese civilisation is not lower, it is higher than that of any of the new countries who refuse to permit the Japanese to live among them.
That, I admit, does not settle the question. Competent and impartial men like Admiral Mahan, who would admit all that I have urged, still maintain that the Japanese ought not to be allowed to settle in the West. This conclusion I do not now discuss. The point I wish to make is that the question can never be fairly faced, in a dry light, and with reference only to the simple facts, until the prejudice is broken up and destroyed that the Japanese, and all other Orientals, are "inferior" races. It is this prejudice which distorts all the facts and all the values, which makes Californians and British Columbians and Australians sheerly unreasonable, and causes them to jump at one argument after another, each more fallacious than the last, to defend an attitude which at bottom is nothing but the childish and ignorant hatred of the uncultivated man for everything strange. If the Japanese had had white skins, should we ever have heard of the economic argument? And should we ever have been presented with that new shibboleth "unassimilable"?
VII
HOME
Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London! What a crescendo of life! What a quickening of the flow! What a gathering intensity! "Whatever else we may think of the West," I said to the young French artist, "it is, at any rate, the centre of life." "Yes," he replied, "but the curious thing is that that Life produces only Death. Dead things, and dead people." I reflected. Yes! The things certainly were dead. Look at the Louvre! Look at the Madeleine! Look at any of the streets! Machine-men had made it all, not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? "Certainly!" he insisted. "Their works are a proof. Where there is life there is art. And there is no art in the modern world—neither in the East nor in the West." "Then what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at the roaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Steam."
With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot criticism and speculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, in the trim hedgerows and fields, in the sound of English voices and the sight of English faces. In London it was the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, the discreetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young men in City offices who reassured me about my baggage, the autumn sun on the maze of misty streets, the vast picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of a mountain or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St. Paul's—"Dead," I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade,—I went in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold space came the dreary wail I remembered so well. I had heard Church music at Moscow, and knew what it ought to be. But the tremendous passion of that Eastern plain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a "sacred edifice"; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines of Japan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of cheerful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and came under the dome. Then something happened—the thing that always happens when one comes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, the dome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragments visions of my journey—Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese, white robes and bare limbs from Japan, plains of corn, plains of rice, plains of scorched grass; snow-peaks under the stars, volcanoes, green and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean; hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble palaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors, and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations of peasants through long millenniums, toiling, suffering, believing, in one unchanging course of life, before the dawn of history on and down to here and now. As they were, so they are; and I heard them sound as with the drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone something new appeared. Late in time, Western history emerged, and—astonishing thing—began to move and change! "Why," I said, "there's something trying to happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?" There was not one. But there was—has the reader ever heard the second—or is it the third?—overture to "Leonora"? A scale begins to run up, first on the violins; then one by one the other instruments join in, till the great basses are swept into the current and run and scale too. So it was here. The West began; but the East caught it up. The unchanging drone began to move and flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more and more intensely, crying and flaming towards—what? Beethoven knew, and put it into his music. We cannot put it into ideas or words. We can see the problem, not the solution; and the problem is this. To reconcile the Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eternity; the Western multiformity with the Eastern identity; the Western energy with the Eastern peace. For God is neither Time nor Eternity, but Time in Eternity; neither One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit nor Matter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, and the great saints; the modern artists and the modern saints, who have been or who will be. Goethe was one; Beethoven was one; and there will be greater, when the contact between East and West becomes closer, and the sparks from pole to pole fly faster.
I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the organ had stopped. I left the great church and came out upon the back of Queen Anne, which made me laugh. Still, it was quite religious; so were the 'buses, and the motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the Law Courts, and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. "Dear people," I said, "you are not dead, any more than I am. You think you are, as I too often do. When you feel dead you should go to church; but not in a 'sacred edifice.' Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better."